“You’ve been out of soils for weeks now,” said Jeweltongue. “You come home every seventh day and bang round the house like a djinn in a bottle, and go off again next morning looking like the herald of the end of the world, I say this with the understanding that you may now upend the remains of your bowl over my head.”
Lionheart’s face relaxed, and she gave a faint and reluctant laugh. “I’m sorry. I know I am—I am not at my best, which is to say that I know you must know that I am not at my best, and I—I—oh, I can’t help it! It’s just the way it is. It won’t go on forever. I can’t...” But whatever else she thought of saying remained unsaid.
Jewcltongue laid the net and the ribbons down and came over to help Lionheart mop up. “What’s wrong, dearest? Surely it would be a little easier for you if you told us.”
Lionheart, on her knees, leant her forehead against the edge of the table and closed her eyes. “No.”
“Weil, will you tell me anyway if I ask you?”
Lionheart opened her eyes and began to smile. “You are giving me warning you are about to begin plaguing me to death about it, are you?”
“Yes,” said JeweJtongue at once. “I was willing to let it alone, you know, and wait for you to solve it yourself, but it’s been weeks. It’s been—it’s been since the week after you went to the horse fair with Mr Horsewise. Your great triumph, I thought. Has Mr Horsewise decided his protege is just a little too young to be so clever?”
“Your estimation of my abilities is touching but misplaced,” said Lionheart—“Mr Horsewise knows more than I’ll ever learn. It isn’t Mr Horsewise.”
“Then you had better straighten out whatever it is, or it will be Mr Horsewise,” said Jeweltongue, “because I can’t believe you aren’t behaving like this at work too. I know you too well.”
LionhearL rocked back on her heels and stared wide-eyed at Jeweltongue, and then her face began to twist and crumple, and, savagely as she bit her lips, the tears would come. Jeweltongue put her arms round her, and Lionheart pressed her face into her sister’s breast and roared, for Lionheart could never weep quietly.
Their father rose from his place by the sitting-room hearth, and came to the sink, and began to pump water for the teakettle, stooping to pal Lionheart’s back as he passed her. He filled a bowl and left it on the table near Jeweltongue, with a towel, and when Lionheart had subsided to a snuffle, Jeweltongue tenderly wiped her sister’s face till Lionheart snatched the towel away from her with a return of her usual spirit and mutlered, “I’m not a baby, even if I’m behaving like one,” and scrubbed at her face till the skin turned a bright blotchy red, “Matches your eyes nicely, dear,” said Jeweltongue.
Teacosy, judging that emotions were cooling to a safe level, came out from behind die old merchant’s armchair, to which haven she had withdrawn after being hit in the eye with some Hying batter. She sidled up to Lionheart, put her nose in Lionhearl’s lap, and when she was not rebuffed, the rest of her followed.
The old merchant made tea and passed cups down to the two sisters still sitting on the floor, murmuring, “Old bones, you must forgive me,” and drew up a chair for himself. When he sat down, Lionheart leant back against his legs and sighed, and be stroked the damp hair away from her forehead.
“It’s—it’s Aubrey,” Lionheart said at last. “He’s—he’s guessed.”
“He won’t have you turned away!” said Jeweltongue, shocked. “I would not have thought him susceptible to doltish views of propriety. And he has been a good friend to you. has he not?”
“It’s worse than that,” said Lionheart. “I—I’m in love with him. And I think—I’m pretty sure—he’s in love with me.”
“But that’s not—”
“Isn’t it?” said Lionheart swiftly. “Has Master Jack forgiven you for preferring a short, stoop-shouldered fiour-monger with hands like boiled puddings to his tall, elegant, noble self, whose white hands have never seen a day’s work? D’you want to think about what happens next? This is going to be one Loo many for Master Jack’s vanity, from the occupants of that tatty little witch’s cottage beyond the trees at the edge of Farmer Goldfield’s lands, where no respectable sort of folk ought to be willing to live in the first place. You must have heard some of the stories that are being told about why Beauty . .. where Beauty . . . why she isn’t here just now. Stories with magic in them, here in Longchance, where everyone knows magic never comes.”
Her voice faltered, and then she went on. “And surely you’ve heard that there’s a curse on this place if three sisters live in it’.’ The tads like to tease me about it, say I’m pretty enough to be a girl if I wore a dress and learnt to walk right, hut they’ve never told me what exactly the curse is, and I don’t like to ask outright, do I?
“Our friends love us, so at present the stories are only stories, even the curse—whatever it is. But... the True-words do what their eldest son tells them to, you know; they think he’s wonderful: they think he’s just loo clever and wise and good to bother himself with doing anything. And Longchance does what the Truewords tell them.”
Beauty felt herself driven out of her own dream, pushed away, as if by a storm wind, and battered and beaten by some force she could not resist—but the sensation was much more sluggish lhan that. She felt weighed down, dragged, muffled and inauled. She no longer dreamt, but she could not wake, and she tossed in her bed as if her bedclothes imprisoned her.
Finally she threw herself successfully into wakefulness, and there was sunlight on the carpet, and the teapot steaming through the spout slit in the tea-cosy. All her pillows had fallen to the floor, and the bedclothes, and her own hair, were wound in a great snarl round her. It took her a minute or two to creep free, for she moved languidly, and she had trouble understanding what she was looking at and which way to pull to loosen the snare. She had to think about it to so much as brush her hair out of her mouth in the right direction. Even awake as she was now it was difficult not to feel trapped and to struggle blindly.
She felt her way down the bed stairs and poured herself a cup of tea with an unsteady hand and then sat, staring at the cup while the tea grew cold, holding the embroidered heart in both her hands, and saying to herself. It was only a dream. It was only a dream. Please. It was only a dream.